Agency and Incompatibilism

Incompatibilism and “Bypassed” Agency

CONDITION: In Universe A, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions? YES NO Only 14% of subjects in the abstract condition thought that it would be possible for an agent to be fully morally responsible in Universe A, while 72% in the concrete condition thought that Bill was fully morally responsible for his action. Judging from these results, different ways o...

Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, ...

Borderline Cases, Incompatibilism and Plurivaluationism

Diana Raffman’s book “Unruly Words” is a remarkable achievement and contribution to the study of vagueness. Parts of Raffman’s book had circulated since at least 2008, in particular the last chapter (chapter 5), in which Raffman presents experimental results about dynamic sorites and discusses the phenomenon of hysteresis. My own work over the same period, like that of several colleagues and th...

A Master Argument for Incompatibilism

Compatibilism and Incompatibilism in Social Cognition.

Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibili...